“Starhawk is the well-known feminist Witch, Earth activist, and writer who initiated the Reclaiming Witchcraft Tradition in San Francisco in 1979. Her books on Pagan ecospirituality, such as The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion (HarperOne, 20th anniv. ed., 1999) and the novel The Fifth Sacred Thing (Bantam, 1993), are still bestsellers. Over the last four decades her thinking and practices have spun off the emergent Goddess spirituality movement, but have also provoked and influenced feminist theologians. One of them is Rosemary R. Ruether, herself a major contributor to feminist theologizing in all Western traditions — be it Christian, Jewish, or Pagan. Over the last ten years, Ruether and Starhawk have developed similar interests in feminist earth practices, honored the four elements and permacultural social principles, and have quoted each other’s work respectfully. In this session all are invited to reflect on the notion of “elemental theology” and/or “feminist Earth practices” as a possible crossroad for feminist theology of different faiths to meet.”

I was lucky enough to get permission from the Contemporary Pagan Studies group to record this talk so that they could make a transcript available later. I’d like to post an excerpt of the entire panel, featuring Starhawk’s opening remarks.

As you can hear, its a wide-ranging speech that touches on elemental theology, activism, the Occupy movement, permaculture, and other topics. I hope to, in the future, feature more excerpts from this panel, as the contributions were important, not only from Starhawk and Rosemary R. Ruether, but from the responders: Marion S. Grau, Jone Salomonsen, and Heather Eaton. In addition, there was a spirited and interesting Q&A period that should also interest readers here. Once details emerge as to where and when the transcript will be published, I’ll post that information.

Thanks for the audio. That is Starhawk at her best, articulating fundamental principles and revealing the interconnectedness of life.

Baruch Dreamstalker

I was blown away (no pun intended) that the Dust Bowl might have released as much CO2 as all the cars in history.

There’s a vibrant statement of faith toward the end: The Earth wants to work with us. As a Pagan I embrace it, but the cold Darwinian fact is that the Earth can move past us and get along without us as it did for billions of years before us. If we want to work with the Earth we need to be the ones reaching out (and of course Starhawk is a pioneer in showing us how to do that).